Letter 13--Blickenstaff and Diamondback

12/9/05


Hello,
Just a friendly reminder to let everyone know how I'm doing. I'm not doing too bad, although I think I might have caught a little cold. I guess that is to be expected when living in a room with 20 other people. We are living on an Iraqi compound called FOB (forward operating base) Blickenstaff. I don't know who makes up the names for these things, but that is what it is called. We are only a couple of blocks away from FOB Blickenstaff and FOB Marez. We make routine trips to both areas. They are anything but routine though. We go through two intersections to get there and we travel in the lane that has the least amount of traffic, even if it means the traffic is incoming. Habits that I will have to break when I get back home. I got a haircut yesterday for 3 bucks and it even came with a massage. The barber was from Nepal and the massage was equivalent to being mugged. The guy was literally hitting me on the head and doing karate chops to my back. I'm sure Amy would have loved it though. The food is pretty good on Diamondback, they have a large selection to choose from, but I usually get the stir fry, because it is like a Mongolian style where you choose the vegetables and meat and they fry it up for you with whatever spices you want. The food on Blickenstaff though, nobody really likes. Even the Iraqis have been complaining about the quality of food. At first it was a racial issue, because the contractors who prepare the food are from India and they don't like them. However, Iraqis are actually cooking the food for the Iraqis and when they found that out, they changed their story to it being the food itself. They are very interesting people, strange, but interesting. One even tried to sell us a AAA battery today. That's it, a single battery, that was probably already used. They will sell anything we issue them at a market too. They sell ammo and then complain when they don't have any. During their briefings, they point at a map and said "some go on this half and some go on this half." It took about an hour but they finally decided on how many should go to which half, and they even narrowed it down to a specific location. Well, it looks like we have our work cut out for us. I'll keep in touch and I should be leaving Mosul sometime before Christmas if everything goes well during the elections. Take care.
love,
Billy